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Talk:African Warlords/@comment-11854534-20130711012550
Maybe instead of The African Warlords, this faction should be named the African Confederacy. I say this for multiple reasons. 1) The implications I personally take from "Warlords" is that the Africans have minimal organization or command skills and are only loosely affiliated with each other. While this could well be what you guys were going for, it seems somewhat unreasonable in regards to the game. As of writing this post, the Warlords have kicked all other powers out of Africa, have taken the Middle East, Greece and are pushing into China. I have a lot of trouble accepting that a loose collective of Warlords and Despots (who are dealing with "frequent coups" and a "chaotic political climate") would be capable of the logistic and strategic preparations for this to happen. Even peoples we traditional think of as "barbarous" such as the Huns had a system of governance and complicated command structure. Simply going by the shory write up, such a command structure is absent from the Warlords and because of this I find the idea of them coordinating succesful cross continental campaigns in the face of organized resistance laughable. 2) Another reason I object to the name African Warlords and the constant reference to "tribes" is that it implies that there are no African nation-states at this time. By this time (early 1940s) there were numerous African nations. Some of these were crafted by colonial powers while others were entirely African like Ethiopia which had never been conquered by a European nation. At the risk of sounding overly Eurocentric, many African peoples at this time had "progressed" beyond the tribal stage of cultural existance. Does this faction summary imply that after driving Europeans out of Africa, peoples across the continent elected to return to a tribal existance? That's preposterous. Just look at South Africa. After the end of Apartheid, South Africans didn't revert to tribal identies. Indeed, since removing this colonial power (arguably one of the most repressive ones) Nationalism has increased amoung blacks living in the nation. Tribal idenity (more commonly refered to ethnicity) is undoubtably important to many African peoples, but so is the nation they belong to. Just because Europe was kicked out of Africa does not mean these nations are going to crumble over night. 3) My final objection to the idea of African Warlords follows from my second point. If (at least several) nations exist within Africa, what is their role in regards to these Warlords? Have they been overthrown? Do nations back certain despots or do they try to keep away from the fighting? There is no mention of what nations remain or their relationship to the Warlords. For all the above reasons, I think the African Warlords should be renamed the African Confederacy. A confederacy is a group of peoples who have united in a common cause, but who have significant independence from one another. This makes sense given that the peoples of Africa are an incredibly diverse collection of humanity. Countless wars have been fought thoughout history between African nations and they hold many conflicting ideologies, relgions and goals. The idea that they would all submit to a central authority is insanity. Now a Confederation which contains multiple powerful factions uniting for mutual protection and power makes sense to me. Such a Confederation could be built in such a way that factions must only commit forces to a battle they agree to. Not only would such a Confederation be more plausable but quite frankly I think it would be more interesting. Special units belonging to the "Arab League" the "Western Coalition" or the "Free Peoples of the Sahara" could be added in later Episodes, as well as units or cards drawn from dozens of African nations (either historical or fabricated). In addition from the Lore perspective, the interplay between the competing factions and political maneuverings within the Confederation sounds a lot more interesting than "They're Warlords. They are fighting because...uh...that's what Warlords do. Right?" Another advantage to creating this African Confederacy is that all units currently part of the Warband could be plausable in the Confederacy. Some units may require name changes and in later episodes it might make sense to introduce more vehicles as these are not only tribal peoples, but making the Warband a Confederacy would only change the political organization behind the army, not the army itself. In conclusion, if you guys are hell bent on the Warlord idea for either technical or personal reasons there needs to be a lot more about this faction than this short summary. In fact, calling this a summary seems a little generous. The process by which the African peoples threw off the yoke of Imperialism and what government rose to replace European domination needs more than four sentences.